Maybe that's the realistic future of 'self-driving' cars. A teledriver-assisted automous car. It just moves the cab driver from behind the wheel to behind a screen somewhere else.
There's a company in vegas that pilots a rental car to you so you can be picked up anywhere and when you hop out, it drives off. You rent by the hour or something like that
Waymo vehicles are not driven remotely. Remote assistants give the autonomy stack suggestions for how to proceed rather than drive the vehicle. This doesn't require a low latency connection and the robot is still capable of stopping when the situation changes or proceeding as soon as it's able to without a control handover.
Yes, they are not usually driven remotely, but an operator can take the wheel in an emergency situation. Most of the interventions are "this plan or that one?" decisions from the teleoperators.
That still isn't really "autonomous," but it's a lot closer than anything Tesla has done. My question, though, is how frequent the interventions actually are.
It also doesn't scale, which is the big problem. Waymo works but excruciatingly mapping out the city and its routes. It's not a generalized autonomous driving algorithm.
Which is probably fine, but it does mean it will never make it to a lot of areas.